Like the titular character in The Princess and the Pea, the members of the Great Internet Lady Hating Machine have developed a truly impressive sensitivity towards the slightest perceived discomfort. And so it shouldn’t really come as that much of a surprise that a small army of perpetually outraged comics fanbabies are currently losing their collective shit over a milkshake selfie.

On Friday, Heather Antos‏, a Marvel comic editor who just happens to be a woman, tweeted a selfie featuring her and a bunch of her female co-workers enjoying some delicious beverages together. “It’s the Marvel milkshake crew!” she announced to her Twitter followers.

She was immediately swarmed by a squadron of fanbabies furious that such “fake geek girls” had made their way into Marvel’s inner sanctum.

According to Antos, the private messages she got in response to her tweet were considerably less polite. “[T]he internet is an awful, horrible, and disgusting place,” she wrote, noting that she woke up Sunday, two days after she posted the selfie,

to a slew of more garbage tweets and DMs. For being a woman. In comics. Who posted a selfie of her friends getting milkshakes.

And yes, the fanbabies are still going at it today. For many of Antos’ “critics,” the selfie proved a perfect excuse to rant about Marvel’s alleged “anti-white, anti-men agenda.”

What's sad is that Marvel is pushing a feminist agenda.Why are ya'll always like "Yeaaa I'm a woman! Look how much of a man I can be too!"

Happily, at this point the “virtue-signalers” are winning. A wide assortment of non-reactionary comics artists, sellers and fans, female and male, have been showing their solidarity with the Marvel Milkshake Crew, filling the #MakeMineMilkshake hashtag with tweets like these:

Comments

@Surplus to Requirements, Observer of the Vast Blight-Wing Enstupidation

We’re not a monolith though. Even within our own countries. We have anti-communism and conservatism to thank for that. We’re still plagued by the poisonous ideologies left behind by fascist dictators and their fact-resistant hordes of idiots.

The Abaháui, Wangari Maathai and Hiware Bazar videos show what can be done when one outstanding individual inspires a village or a region – and even earn a Nobel Peace Prize in Wangari Maathai’s case.

The China example is of terra-forming on a massive scale – the landscape of the “project” is the size of Belgium. One thing to note about the China and Ethiopian govt run projects – they can only get the population fully involved when they finally, _eventually_ realise that nothing will get done without changing-granting land rights.

If you hunt around for videos on India, particularly the Maharashtra region, for watershed management, you might like to think about the approach of WOTR – started by Father Hermann Bacher. They don’t just get everyone involved in building check dams, they make damned sure that women are empowered by-during the process. Very different from Maathai’s approach, but different strategies for the same ends. Whatever you want to do about culture-religion-social structures, there’s a couple of examples of combining hard physical work with literacy and other social change.

As a long-time Marvel fan, I will never understand why these individuals would have ever read Marvel comics, and I somewhat suspect that many of them never did. Marvel has always been quite progressive for a comics publisher. I mean, Black Panther and the African nation of Wakanda – the most advanced country on Earth in the Marvel universe – were introduced back in 1966! How progressive is that?

Northstar, an openly gay superhero and mutant, has been around since 1979. Storm, a black woman, led the X-Men for a while back in the ’80s, and has been team leader several times since then. And M aka Monet, a mutant heroine who was introduced in 1994, is a Muslima. Granted, she’s not particularly religious (unlike Dust, an Afghani mutant girl who joined the Xavier’s school in 2002), but she’s still an example of the diversity that has always been part of the Marvel universe.

Needless to say that Marvel’s writers have always strongly condemned racism and other forms of prejudice, bigotry and discrimination against minorities in their stories. There may have been unconscious biases on display in past decades, but Marvel has never catered to the misogynistic, homophobic white supremacist crowd. And until a few years ago, I’ve never heard this choir of complaints about alleged “SJWs” with scary agendas in the comic book industry. I have a hard time believing that these types have ever been actual Marvel readers and fans.

There are tons of female created comics especially depending on how you parse things.

DUMB by Georgia Webber is a great comic about coping with a disability.
ZODIAC STARFORCE by Kevin Panetta & Paulina Ganucheau is a magical girl comic
SPELL ON WHEELS by Kate Leth, Megan Levens & Marissa Louise is a witches on a road trip comic
IMMORTAL SOULS by Joamette Gil is a upcoming kickstarter and follow up to POWER & MAGIC. Both are beautiful anthologies
MAGDELINA by Tini Howard, Ryan Cady, Christian DiBari & Mike Spicer is cool horror comic
REDLANDS is a new comic by award winning colorist Jordie Bellaire
Tini Howard is also writing Hack/Slash, Power Rangers:Pink and Assassinistas (later drawn by frick fakking Gilbert Hernandes)
KORRA coming out through Dark Horse has female editors, and Irene Koh (line artist)& Vivian Ng (colorist) are working on it.
SMALL FAVORS by Colleen Coover is really great
MY LESBIAN EXPERIENCE WITH LONELINESS has everyone all broken up
Iron Circus is putting out loads of books by artists like Melanie Gillman and Sophie Campbell
MOONGIRL AND DEVIL DINOSAUR has a mostly female team
I mean that is an absolutely small start and I can keep going if you need me to, but I can make it more targeted if I have your taste in comics.

AKA the Marvel comic that endures despite the dudebros counting on its cancellation since at least issue #4. (Apparently Marvel made a deal with Scholastic, who sell a metric shitton of it in schools, but as that’s not going through Diamond (the quasi monopoly of comic book distribution), it doesn’t appear in publicly available sales data.)

We Hunted the Mammoth tracks and mocks the white male rage underlying the rise of Trump and Trumpism. This blog is NOT a safe space; given the subject matter -- misogyny and hate -- there's really no way it could be.